Support and Manage Your Quest with Quest Companion Digital Tools
The new year barely got started and my tabletop roleplaying game expectations already begin to come true! Over at Reddit recently I came across a fantastic resource for Quest, an RPG currently in my No. 1 favorite game position. Quest Companion is “your digital best friend for managing your Quest tabletop role-playing games.” In a short time I’ve already seen Quest Companion grow and evolve. Just today I took a look and see there’s several new components moving this resource swiftly towards the perfect fulfillment of my RPG needs. So let’s get into it.
Quest Companion digital tools put the cherry on top for Quest
Quest Companion is a digital tool created and initially shared in a post at the Quest subreddit here. The tools exist on a website with terrific, clean presentation that’s super easy to login and use. At this time there’s four primary workspaces for campaigns, characters, NPCs and worlds. In addition there’s a built in dice roller and a generator for Tough Choices, one of the results of the game’s core mechanic. Since the creators of the game offer a Creative Commons license and Community Creators Resource for the game anyone can create content for Quest. This means Quest Companion incorporates the material from there into the tools, which result in a robust and incredibly useful resource.
I suppose I ought to back things up a little and explain that Quest is a fantasy roleplaying game about the adventures of you and your friends. I’ve written a few other posts about the game, which you can find here. Everything about the game from the elegant simplicity of the rules to the wonderful perspective on gaming presented in the book won me over heart, mind and soul. You can imagine my great joy coming across Quest Companion so soon after expressing my RPG hopes for this year — this digital tool nails it!
In just a few days on Feb. 1 a new Kickstarter from the creators of Quest launches for the game’s first expansion. I’m super excited about this! There’s a ton of awesome stuff in Quest’s future and hopefully they’ll revise the Community Creators Resource so the new goodies can become part of Quest Companion too. You can find out more about the expansion here.
In the meantime I’m so enthused about Quest Companion that I reached out to the creator Hacklone on Reddit to get the inside scoop and signal boost the work they’re doing for the Quest community. And if I’m honest there’s some personal stakes in this too — I want Quest Companion to continue growing! Hacklone is interested in gathering feedback and suggestions about Quest Companion and I’m more than happy to help point some folks over there.
What inspired you to create Quest Companion?
I’m relatively new to tabletop RPGs but I immediately fell in love with the concept. I set out to start a group and it turned out to be a harder thing than I expected. So I tried to figure out what could be the obstacle for them and it turned out that though they loved the idea, they simply didn’t have the “time” (motivation) to learn into a complicated system. That’s how I found Quest, which is a delight to learn but still lacked modern digital tools. That’s why I started to put together Quest Companion, which turned out to be what quite a lot of us needed. 🙂
Do you create other kinds of content for Quest or any other tabletop RPGs?
I believe that Quest Companion already has many useful features that can be used for other RPGs as well like the campaign management but to be honest I haven’t done a big scale market research so I suspect there are other solutions out there for other RPGs. If there were a need to add other RPG specific things to Quest Companion, I’m very open to the idea.
How has the process of sharing and collecting feedback been? Any surprises or innovations spun out of this?
I was quite surprised how helpful and welcoming the TTRPG community is. I got tons of ideas through various channels. For example the campaign manager was mentioned multiple times as a feature sorely needed and missing from tools currently available. So this community turned out to be quite imaginative (no wonder ;)) in coming up with innovative ideas.
What challenges have you overcome with this project?
There were some minor technical challenges, like I built the first version with FireBase, which helped me to move faster but it started to make things like sharing of campaigns and characters quite complicated. So I decided to migrate away from FireBase to a more solid and conventional solution.
And of course the ultimate challenge that I haven’t yet managed to overcome is balancing with my time and trying to find cheap solutions so that players can keep using it even with steadily growing number of users.
What’s your goal with Quest Companion?
First I really want to help people get into the world of TTRPG as it’s an amazing experience. I believe that these games deserve the attention and modern tools like Quest Companion.
Currently I’m flooded with ideas like building a mobile app, pre-made Adventures/NPCs, adding other RPG systems like DnD, being able to share characters, pre-made customizable artwork and the list goes on and on. But most of the cool ideas would require additional investment apart from the development effort, so I’m not yet sure how to proceed. Maybe I’ll start an IndieGoGo campaign to kickstart them.
At the end of the day, if I’ve spent some of my time to make others happy, it was worth it 😉
Hacklone also expressed how the community for Quest Companion is still quite scattered, so they started a Discord channel. You can find that here. You can also follow along on Twitter @QuestCompanion. You can find Quest Companion and start using this wonderful digital tool today right here. Be sure to share your helpful feedback and features you’d like to see through there and help this awesome creator!
*Featured image — A wizard conjures magical dice and manages all their Quest content with the fantastic Quest Companion. [Illustration by katiecones]
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